A contemporary poetry blog

Emily Critchley’s Love / All That / & OK

Emily Critchley was born in Athens, Greece, and grew up in Dorset. She studied at the Universities of Oxford, Bristol and Cambridge. From Cambridge she gained a PhD in contemporary, American women’s experimental writing and philosophy, and was the recipient of the John Kinsella & Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize in 2004. She now lectures in English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

Love / All That /& OK (Penned in the Margins, 2011), an anti-confessional by experimental British poet Emily Critchley, brings together a diverse range of work previously published in chapbooks since 2004, and includes new material from the sequences ‘Poems for Luke’, ‘The Sonnets’ and ‘Poems for Other People’.

“Really intelligent, coquette, fuck-you work … a space for a new kind of anti-misogynism in poetry.”

– Marianne Morris

“I think the project is high electrics and considerable. I particularly care for the frailty and edges of coherence loss. It’s the intelligent frays that push under my thought and matter most.”

– Allen Fisher

“Her formally adventurous poetry implicates its author in, then deftly upends, the conventions – political, sexual, intellectual, and emotional – that threaten to diminish the purview of any fierce, bright, 21st-century female. Critchley practises a brisk vernacular anti-lyric, often in the name of love and always in a language that (pounding Pound) ‘hath ‘ham’ innit.’ As an antidote to a future that ‘may be very wrong,’ these poems are absolutely right.”

– Jean Day

from ‘The Sonnets’

I took it for a “door” because that’s what
the man told me. Tried to walk
through it. Couldn’t
take your time, couldn’t
take mine. Unannounced.
While the arch leans bilingual
& equivocal.
Not backed by police
or any kind of force.
So B’s furry but not all that ‘cute’
no more ~ an intellectual thing ~
Like small & pointy, but lacking
brightness, see? & I like buildings
that match structural intent wth design

In summer. Flotilla of scraps
pulled into remnants
by a dead pulley system.
B is right, straight, & points (i)
his dick into the crowd.
Don’t hype up sympathy
for laughs, we cld do this
feelingly if our guts were only
in it, not the cat.
Well, hey, who’s countingwhose failure to be integral, honest,
whole. The sign said
for belief go right
& right again

(i) ‘I’m free, right, and point a gun,’ Catherine Wagner, ‘everyone in the room is a representative of the world at large’